Getting started with Sourcegraph

By Quinn Slack on May 30, 2016

Use Sourcegraph to discover and understand code better

There’s a gold mine of code available to programmers, but choosing the right library and understanding how to use it can be tricky. We created Sourcegraph, a fast, semantic code search and cross-reference engine, to help developers like you discover and understand code better.

Sourcegraph semantically indexes all the open-source code available on the web (in multiple languages). You can search for any definition in code and see everywhere it’s being used. When viewing code, everything is clickable (with jump-to-definition links) and has documentation/type tooltips. And you can do all of this in your web browser, without needing to configure any editor plugins.

Semantic search for projects, functions, or packages

Sourcegraph indexes code at a semantic level, which means it parses and understands code the same way a compiler does. This is necessary to support features like semantic search and finding usage examples. It currently supports Go, JavaScript, and TypeScript. Python, Java, and other languages are coming soon.

Are you a repository author?

If you’re an author (or user) of an open-source project or library, you should sign up and index the code on Sourcegraph. This lets contributors and users of your libraries search and browse the code on Sourcegraph. These features can help your users save hours by letting them quickly find and understand pieces of code. A single good usage example can be worth a thousand words of documentation. Indexing repositories is free and always will be for open source (and private code).